Karin Preller

Current Review(s)

'Stills'

Karin Preller at Artspace

In the catalogue for the Hayward Gallery’s 2007 ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ 2007, New York artist Judith Eisler said that her work was about find peripheral moments in narratives that would otherwise remain undetected. ‘I want to hear the sound of a pause’, she stated. Describing her methodology of painting from film stills, Eisler stated a resistance to the notion of appropriating the film’s narratives and structures in her works. Rather, she is ‘interested in the new narratives that inevitably emerge within the frame of the painting’.

Karin Preller’s paintings are arguably kindred spirits of Eisler’s. With ‘Stills’, her 2009 exhibition at Johannesburg’s Artspace, Preller mines personal history and nostalgia for her subject matter, using still images from old 8mm home movies made by her family.

Yet the works are also crucially about the act of slowing down the moving image, and providing the viewer with a chance to ruminate on the frozen moment. Preller’s decontextualised images paradoxically evoke the terms of memory (images in the Brixton, 1960’s series is literally rose-tinted, and the rough edges of detail softened) and deny its operation (narratives separated out from their flow, fragmented, and images arbitrarily cropped).

06 June 2009 - 27 June 2009

'City and Suburban'

Karin Preller at Standard Bank Gallery

Karin Preller’s ‘City and Suburban', an exhibition of new paintings and a film projection, occupied the downstairs section of the Standard Bank Gallery concurrently to Nicholas Hlobo’s headline show ‘Umtshotsho’, a body of work made after he won the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Award in 2009. Preller and Hlobo share an interest in representing identity, but Preller’s view is far more detached than Hlobo’s. For her, ‘identity’ is elusive, inseparable from memory, and located somewhere between the public and private geographies of Johannesburg in the 1960s and 1970s. The locations around which she centers her enquiry are the city and suburban settings that are recorded in her personal pictorial archive, and she explores the potential of the medium of oil on canvas to complicate notions of memory and history within these locations.

04 May 2010 - 19 June 2010

Listings(s)

'Stills'

Karin Preller at Artspace

Ace painter Karin Preller presents ‘Stills’, a show of new works at Artspace during June. The works take as their subjects still film images from home movies made in the 1960’s in Preller’s childhood suburbs of Montgomery Park and Langlaagte.

06 June 2009 - 27 June 2009

'City and Suburban'

Karin Preller at Standard Bank Gallery

Karin Preller's solo exhibition in the downstairs area of the Standard Bank Gallery pieces together fragments of a home video made by her father in the Johannesburg of the 1960's. This exhibition of oil paintings traces the complex relationship between memory and representation.

04 May 2010 - 19 June 2010